The violent outrages of humanity are not met by a God who poses as a teddy bear. For the sake of peace, we must long for the day when the just God excludes everything that stands implacably opposed to him.

I was angry. And justifiably so: my six-year-old child had, after a long afternoon of defiance and belligerence, come close to me, feigning a cuddle—and then head-butted me on the bridge of the nose.

My reaction was instantaneous and born from anger. I slapped him: not especially hard, but enough to upset him and his mother, who witnessed the whole thing.

What had I done? I was shocked by my own rage and the violence it had spawned, and I was instantly filled with regret and doubts. It didn’t take him long to recover as it turned out, and within minutes he was laughing and playing happily. But still: I had lifted my hand, in anger, against my child, violently. Rather than absorbing and restraining his lashing out against me, or disciplining him in a measured way, I had repaid him in kind. Would he always remember this moment with bitterness in his heart? I was appalled at myself.

When human beings use violence, even with the intent to uphold the good, it seems so difficult to control. It rarely remains confined to the boundaries we attempt to set for it, but rather spreads like a bushfire jumping the firebreaks. Even then, human societies are loath to let go of violence as a means to settle all manner of problems. In some bizarre way, we like to think that violence has a cleansing effect.

One of the most violent movies I have ever seen was Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. It wasn’t so much that the body count was very high – it was only three—but that the violence was prolonged and concentrated on one individual. It wasn’t cartoonish, like it is in Rambo. It was repulsive and yet it drew me in at the same time. It was a reminder of just what a combination of religious hypocrisy, political expediency and military efficiency can accomplish.

But it was quite clear from the film—as it is in the Gospels themselves—that this is a story that is occurring on two planes. Not only were the events of Golgotha a vicious instance of religious and political persecution, they were the site of a cosmic struggle in which the Creator himself was seeking to defeat not only a particular instance of evil, but evil itself. Jesus was sent by God to endure this violent torture and to suffer death. As Isaiah puts it:

…it was the LORD’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer…
(Isaiah 53:10a)

All this horror—the Lord’s will? What God actually wanted? It might be one thing to suggest that Jesus bore upon himself all the hostility and violence of humankind, absorbing every blow that we could throw at him. It is quite another to suggest that this occurred because God himself willed it.

So was God like me but only on a larger scale—lashing out at his own Son in barely-contained rage? Is he lusting for a vengeance that needs an outlet and finds it on the cross? Shouldn’t I be as appalled at God’s rage as I was appalled at my own?

Furthermore, there are those who will argue that the picture of a God who, even with the best of intentions, acts forcefully to exclude evil is the basis for all kinds of human violence. Is it not true that the violence poured out by the Father on the Son has become the pattern for the violence poured out by human beings on other human beings? Even the staunchest defender of religion would have to acknowledge that religiously inspired and justified violence terribly mars our world. And depicting God as vengeful is surely at the core of this problem.

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